


the seventh year

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Happy Ending, M/M, Pining, Selkies, Thorin annoying seals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-19 02:05:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11303499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: Thorin finds Bilbo cast ashore, and never gets an explanation for where he came from. He doesn’t mind all that much – they all have their secrets on this island, and none of them try to think too much about the past. But then, seven years to the day since Bilbo appeared, he disappears, without warning or explanation.





	the seventh year

**Author's Note:**

> My final entry for the Big Bang '17!
> 
> Art by the amazing [mithrilbikini](http://mithrilbikini.tumblr.com/post/162259917317/art-for-northerntrashs-amazing-bagginshield-fic%0A) and the fantastic [teaxdragon!](https://teaxdragon.tumblr.com/post/162257297312/the-seventh-year-by-northerntrash-hbb2017%0A) :)

It was on the seventh anniversary of the day that Thorin had met him that Bilbo disappeared.

Thorin remembered the day well, for all the days that had come since: he had been walking along the long and lonely shore, content in the wild wind, the clear sky, the biting cold that had been all he had ever known of this island that he called home, out of sight of the mainland, suspended in the northern Atlantic. Sharp rocks, rolling moorland, deep scars left in the earth from the mining: this was a hard place, but it was the place that he had always called home, and he was fond of it and its odd inhabitants none the less. He liked his life here, even if it wasn’t perfect, even then, all those years ago. He liked it for its peace, for its solitude, for the beauty that he had always been able to find in it even when other people could not.

The day had started as it always had, as he had assumed it always would be – he had not anticipated any great change in his life, not at this point. He would rise early, the ache in his bones forcing him out of restorative sleep, and he would eat a meagre breakfast with the kitchen window open, still grey-dark outside, letting the always-cold air wake him up properly. No point in a morning shower – he bathed when he returned from work, his skin engrained with the filth of the mines, boiling kettles of water to supplement the poor stream that came from his own hot pipes. Dawn would see him alone on the beach, every morning, settling into his place between the vastness of the sky, the stretch of the sea, neither of them ever really calm. Other shore fronts might see dog walkers, joggers, tourists, but on Erebor the only dogs were working ones, labour was hard enough that additional exercise was viewed more as torture than recreation, and no tourist was stupid enough to want to visit it, no matter how many brightly coloured posters Bofur sent to tourism sites in an ill-advised attempt to ‘get some new faces here’.

He had never been successful. There were, for the most part, only the old, worn faces that Thorin had always known, the ones he had grown up knowing, others who he had known their entire lives. The new people who came – so few, always so few, the graveyards fuller than the churches – were like they were. Faces lined with troubles that they were leaving behind them but would never truly go away, eyes haunted, hunted. People came to the island to hide from things that they couldn’t face any more, finding some sort of redemption in the cold wind, in the deep mine shafts, in the long days and even longer nights.

It was an unspoken rule on the island: never ask the newcomers why they came, never push them to share their stories, for it was only ever tales of woe that brought them here, just as if was grief for a way of life long gone that kept those born to it from leaving. This was a part of their heritage, a part of their bones, a heavy legacy that was engrained in them from a young age that few were ever able to throw off. Few people ever left, only those young and foolish and full of dreams: most of them returned within a year, heads bowed, shoulders full of a pain that did not shift until they were back on the bedrock of the island, as if they had been shackled by their longing to return.

Too much noise, they said.

Too many people.

And because Thorin knew everyone on the island, the man sitting in the sand that fateful day seven years prior pulled him up short: it would have been odd enough to see anyone out at this hour for he was the only one that seemed to have trouble sleeping in – it did, on occasion, happen, but he would normally see them on the road as he returned to his own cottage, rather than on the expanse of beach, the air biting and cruel this early in the morning. But, far odder, this was someone that he didn’t know.

Impossible, had been his first thought. It had been over a week since the ferry had last been here, and the tides were too brutal for any fishing boat to make it to the shore. Surely the man had not come on the ferry though, for if there had been any new arrival Thorin would have been told within the hour – the idea that over a week would have passed without anyone mentioning it was simply inconceivable. His presence here was not just unusual, but a fact that was so singularly impossible that Thorin would not have believed it had he not been looking directly at him.

But there Bilbo had been, a small smile on his face and the curls of his hair damp and crusted with sand, his eyes bright as they followed the course of a lonely gull overhead. And it was that expression, more than anything else that had thrown Thorin, because it was so different from the others that the islanders wore. There was nothing scared in his eyes, nothing lost. He looked as if he was glad to be here, not as if he simply had nowhere else to be.

Thorin hadn’t known what to do with that sort of expression.

In the end he had simply hovered awkwardly until Bilbo noticed him, and then Bilbo had stood, the fabric of a strange grey coat folded over his arm, and had smiled.

That had been it, really – Bilbo had only just arrived, as improbable as that was: he had nowhere to go, nowhere to stay, and so Thorin had helped him, against his less-than-amicable nature. He had showed him back to the village, had installed him in the pub whilst he had gone around and asked inquiries – who had a spare room and wouldn’t mind a guest trying to find his feet for a few nights, that sort of thing, and hadn’t Dis laughed when she caught wind of Thorin trying to help a stranger – he, who muttered under his breath in disgust every time someone mentioned a mainlander. But Bofur had been willing to lend Bilbo his spare room for a week or so, and when he started worked he rented it out on a permanent basis.

After that, Bilbo was just always… around. He hadn’t worked the mines like so many of them, and for that Thorin was glad – the idea of him in the dark tunnels made something twist inside him uncomfortably, the same way that the thought of Fili and Kili growing up into Thorin’s life made him hurt, full of some terrible longing and desperation that he had no words to describe. Luckily Bilbo had no inclination, it seemed, to enter those dark shafts, and soon he was installed in the town’s small post office, seemingly content amongst the dusty shelves and old, faded envelopes. It only stayed open as a formality – no one here had anyone to send letters to, but he seemed to like pottering around the place for the few hours a day that it was set to open, and he did not have too many expenses.

Thorin would seem him around a surprising amount: Bilbo seemed always to be wandering on the beach in the early morning, or the moorland in the late afternoon when Thorin was walking home from the mines. Often their paths crossed, more and more as time passed, and Thorin never quite understood whether it was an intentional on Bilbo’s part, or not. They talked, haltingly at first – Bilbo seemed often confused by things that Thorin would mention, halting the conversation to ask him what he meant, to what he was referring. It threw Thorin, the constant request for explanation, but over time he grew used to it, and Bilbo seemed to smile more when they talked, Thorin glancing quickly away whenever he caught sight of it.

Thorin had never really understood where he had come from – Bilbo had always brushed the question away, muttering under his breath words which he could never quite catch – but Thorin had been content not to know, really. It had taken only a brief acquaintance before he had simply been glad that Bilbo had come at all. And in truth, what did it really matter, when the one thing that this island was willing to offer to its inhabitants was an anonymity, a distance from the mainland, a life that you could make your own without concern for what had transpired elsewhere. And what position was he in to push for answers when there was so much of his own story that he was unwilling to tell? A grandfather, whose name he could not speak; a father, for whom there could never be a gravestone in the island church; a brother, whose life Thorin now had to carry on his shoulders alongside his own.

So he let it be, and he found that as he did he learned not to care that there were parts of Bilbo’s life that he did not know – he realised, along the way, that everyone deserves to have parts of themselves that they keep _for_ themselves, that giving yourself to someone doesn’t mean that they should be obligated to give every part of themselves to you in turn.

He didn’t ask Bilbo about his old salt-water stained suitcase, full of clothes that had gone out of fashion many years ago, clothes that never seem to have been repaired, as if they had never even been worn. He didn’t ask why the leather of the case never seemed quite fully dry, as if it had been submerged for a long period of time. He didn’t ask about the long string of raw pearls that Bilbo looped over the bedroom mirror when he finally – after a long and lovely courtship – decided to move in to Thorin’s small, lonely cottage at the far end of the village, closest to the sea. He didn’t ask about any of the strange objects that found their way into Thorin’s home, in fact – the seashells, the fine bone comb, the ancient pendant, the metal long gone dull. He didn’t push to find out where Bilbo was when his eyes drifted away when he stared at the sea, didn’t ask why sometimes he looked so longingly at the distant breaking waves, why he always watched the surface of the water carefully on still days, as if searching for something beneath the surface.

Thorin never inquired after that strange grey coat that Bilbo never let him touch, that was kept stowed carefully in the trunk at the end of Thorin’s bed, wrapped in soft old jumpers, as if it were something very precious. If there were things about him that seemed strange, Thorin was content enough just to ignore them, for he knew well that there were parts of himself that he wouldn’t want to explain, either.

He had seen Bilbo’s eyes raking curiously over the scars that covered his chest, the burns that curved his shoulders; he had seen those careful fingers reaching towards him, an abortive movement, whenever the darkness that shrouded Thorin’s moods sometimes settled around him like a blanket, leaving him despondent, struggling to move. But he never touched when Thorin could not handle it, always seemed to know, in some instinctive way, where Thorin’s limits were, and never pushed them. And in turn Thorin only touched when Bilbo curved towards him; only kissed when soft skin was offered – and on those days when Bilbo curled in on himself, wracked with some sort of longing that he did not know Thorin sang to him, the only comfort he knew how to offer, gentle lullabies at odd with the harsh wind outside, until Bilbo reached for him again.

People often looked at Bilbo askance – there was something just a little off about him, something odd that no one could quite put their finger on but that everyone felt, nonetheless. Something about the surprise with which he met the world, the strange tactile habits that left him touching fabrics, plants – even, on occasion, his own skin – as if he had never felt them before. His odd ways of holding conversation, drifting off midway through his own sentences as if hearing something that no one else could – the odd words he used from time to time, when he was excited, that no one else knew or understood. Some of the people on the island were uncomfortable with him, Thorin could tell – the old women regarded him cautiously, whispering behind their hands as if they suspected something they were unwilling to say out loud.

But Thorin didn’t care about any of that. So what, if people whispered about Bilbo? A lot of people whispered about him too, his family, his grandfather. He was well used to side stares, to conversations stopping when he walked into a room.

And yes, sometimes Bilbo was like nothing Thorin had ever known – but for Thorin, that was a thing of wonder. He made Thorin look at things differently, think about things differently, feel in a way that he had never felt before.   

It had been unexpected, falling in love – he had never anticipated it, had not seen it coming, had destined himself to a quiet and lonely life without the love of another. But he could not have seen Bilbo coming, and couldn’t have wished for anything quite so wonderful. Seven years they had together, in total: awkward courtship, those early months when neither of them were quite sure where to move, how to touch, what it really meant to be together. That first year of exploration, learning each other in all the ways that really matter before Thorin had held his hand on the morning beach and asked, if Bilbo didn’t mind, if they could try waking up side by side on a more permanent basis.

It wasn’t, he thought, like the love his parents had known, nor like the love shared by Dis and her wife: perhaps, Thorin wondered from time to time, all love was different, in very different ways, and to each came their own. And theirs, theirs was a quiet companionship, warm limbs touching in silence, words spoken with eyes rather than lips, all of it underpinned with a fierce love that made an old, cold miner’s cottage feel suddenly much more like a home.

Lucky, he had felt, for the first time since he was a child.

Happy too, for a time.

And then, Bilbo was gone.

Strange, so strange, and in the weeks following Bilbo’s disappearance he knew that the villagers were sharing the facts amongst themselves, curious, doubtful. None of it made any real sense. All of his possessions were still in place; his old woollen jumpers, his tangled hairbrush, the strange little shells that he liked to pick up from the beach. The bone comb which he hardly ever touched, the string of pearls that he had run his fingers through with such care and love. The small pieces that he had collected since he had come here: the driftwood carvings that Bofur had made him, the small silver chain that Thorin had wrapped around his wrist one cold October morning. All the trappings of his life that he had collected were in place, bar one.

Thorin checked the trunk as soon as he realised that Bilbo wasn’t there, wasn’t on the beach. There were more places he could have gone, of course, but Thorin didn’t really need to look at all. He knew, in a deep and instinctive way, what had happened.

In many ways, he had been waiting for it.

The coat was gone.

The jumpers hat had once wrapped it up were still there, damp to the touch as if the coat had never quite fully dried, and Thorin sat on the floor of their bedroom and pulled one of those jumpers to his face, not caring about the chill. He inhaled, deep and long, and smelled seawater.

He had suspected, as strange as it seemed. He had never asked, never even hinted, but he remembered the name whispered from generation to generation, remembered what had once made this island so special, remembered the stories that must never be passed to outsiders.

_Selich, seolh, saylche. Maighdeann-mhara, maighdeann-ròin._

Selkie.

His grandfather had seen one, so the story went. Had seen one on the beach, had watched it strip from its coat and dance on newly formed legs along the sand. He had taken the coat, his mother had told him, for he had never seen such a beautiful thing, and when his hands had touched the fabric the creature had screamed and his grandfather had run, terribly afraid. When he reached home he had burned the coat, in fear of what would happen should the creature find him and take her revenge, and the next morning they had found the woman washed up upon the beach, entirely human, dead. His grandfather had taken from her the raiment of her magic, cursed her to a life of mortality when all she had wanted was a dance upon solid ground, and she had taken her own life in the water, unable to face the thought of a life without the sea.

Their family had been cursed ever since then, his mother had told him, tears in her eyes at his father’s funeral, held without a body. The creatures were taking their revenge against his line, one after the other – an eye for an eye, a life for a life – and the lives of these creatures were long indeed. They would have to take many mortal lives before the debt was paid in full.

Of course, for many years he had not believed his mother – even having seen his grandfather’s decline to madness and risk and his father’s subsequent death in the deep mines, sent down to find a seam that Thror had been convinced was down there despite all advice to the contrary. He was lost to the stone, a cave-in blocking them from ever finding his body. Thorin still had nightmares at the thought of Thrain, trapped in the dark. Had he suffocated before he starved, or had dehydration taken him first? No one could tell him what supplies his father had on him when he had been taken by the darkness, alone, afraid. He would never know what actually happened.

But even then, with the grief and fear heavy in his heart, he had not believed in his family curse. It was only after the death of his brother, lost to the sea – and Frerin had always been such a strong swimmer, he knew the tides and the currents like the lines on his palms, how could they have taken him? – that he had started to wonder.

Selkies.

The stories about them were much the same, no matter who told them. Creatures of the sea, of the brine and the tidal rocks: days by one form, days by another. Seals, when they wore their seal skins, and human when they took them off and took to land on shaky legs. Creatures of wonder and cold weather and the old magics of the world, swimmers of the riptide, hunters of the ocean. Sleek and swift in their animal form, beautiful and beguiling in their human. Burn a selkie’s coat and they would never return to the ocean, trapped forever in one form, on land. There were stories of men who fell in love with selkies, who had burned their skins to keep them on dry land forever, for every seven years the selkies must return to the sea, or else they would forsake their animal form forever, much as if their skin had been burnt. That was why the selkie in his mother’s story had thrown herself to the cold water: never again would she be able to return to her kin, to her loved ones. Never again would she feel her body move through the water, sleek and agile. Never again would she go home.

But even then, he hadn’t really believed in them, not in any real meaningful way. When he had looked into Bilbo’s eyes and had seen all the colours of the sea move within them in a way that wasn’t quite natural, he had wondered – but even then, without proof he struggled to believe. How can you believe in something when no one has seen one in generations, when most people have relegated them to the place of myth? Had it not been for his mother’s story, for the slow decay of his family, he wouldn’t have even entertained the idea.

But it had been there none the less, lurking in the back of his mind.

Where _had_ Bilbo come from he had found himself wondering, in that sixth year when Bilbo’s eyes seemed to drift to the sea more and more often, when Thorin found him with increasing regularity down on the beach, his feet in the water and his eyes on the distant horizon – those strange, strange eyes. He never mentioned his past, his family, his friends, where he had come from. There were so many things that he hadn’t known how to use when he had first arrived – the telephone, the oven, money. He had been startled by electric lights that first day on the island. So many foods that he had never tried, had never even heard of – when asked what he wanted to eat, in those early days, he had always said fish, posed as an uncertain question, as if he wasn’t sure what other options there _were._ Those pearls, that could only have come from deep water, that case that might have been salvaged from an ancient wreck, those clothes, that might have been brought back by older selkies, from different times.

Six years together, he had wondered. And on the seventh year…

And so when Bilbo had disappeared he hadn’t been surprised, as such – well, no, he hadn’t really expected it to happen. He hadn’t really believed in the idea that he had entertained from time to time, but when he had woken to a cold bed on the anniversary of the day he had met Bilbo it hit him, all of a sudden, that he had been right.

He couldn’t really tell you _how_ he knew, or why, but he did.

Thorin sat on the beach for hours that day. He didn’t go down the mines, for the first time in as long as he could remember – he had even gone to work the day that they had learned that Frerin had died, taking his grief out on the cold, uncaring rock. But that day he simply sat on the sand and stared at the sea, biting his lip, wondering.

Dis had come to find him in the end. She had taken one look at him and sat down beside him, laying back against the beach, wrapped up in her longest coat, her face mostly hidden behind her scarf and the fall of her hair.

“I don’t know how you can stand to be down here every day,” she told him, her voice quiet, muffled by the wind.

Thorin didn’t answer: they had had this conversation far too many times.

“Bilbo’s gone,” is what he said, in the end. “I woke up this morning and he had gone.”

Dis sat up at that, and stared at him. Her brow was furrowed, her mouth puckered as if she had been about to say something but had pulled it back at the last moment.

“Do you know where he has gone?” she asked, eventually, and he had shrugged, not really giving any particular answer. Dis accepted that, nodding slightly as she followed his gaze out to the sea. Today it was wild and grey, untameable: the line of the water seemed to blend into the rolling dark clouds above.

“You know what people have said about him, don’t you?” she said, after a long pause. “About… what he might be?”

She didn’t want to say it, he realised. And he couldn’t blame her, really – it would sound quite ridiculous to say it out loud. Who in this day and age really believed, who would believe, apart from perhaps the lonely, superstitious people trapped on a tiny island in the Atlantic, hidden away from the rest of the modern world?

“I haven’t listened,” Thorin replied. “But I think I know what you mean… in terms of where he might have come from.”

Dis took his hand, then, and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.

“What are you going to do?”

He sniffed, and squeezed her hand.

“I’m going to get a boat.”

  


* * *

  


It had been many years since he had sailed, but the ways came back to him quickly, as if they had never quite left him. There was an unpleasant taste to his mouth as he took to the open water, metallic and bitter, and as the water lapped the side of his boat he hesitated, for a moment, thinking of the last time he had been out here, with Frerin, before the riptide had taken him, before the sea had claimed once more an islander to its depths. But he closed his eyes, and unbidden came to his mind the memory of his brother’s laugh, bright and fearless, and he felt a courage within him, a certainty too, that he could not turn back.

When he opened his eyes once more it was to the sight of a seal, its head just above the water, watching him quite carefully. It did not seem afraid – curious perhaps, but certainly not afraid – as if it knew that out here Thorin was in its territory, that it was safe from him.

Which indeed, it was. Thorin regarded its intelligent eyes for a long moment before a name escaped his lips, half-breathed, not quite with hope but not quite without.

“Bilbo?” he asked, and the seal snorted, a sound quite surprisingly full of derision. Thorin blinked, before frowning.

“I don’t know why you’re looking so judgemental, you’re a damn seal,” he said, and the seal seemed almost to roll its eyes at him, before it disappeared beneath the water with a flick of its tail, splashing water against the side of the boat. The sting of salt met Thorin’s eyes, and he took a moment to wipe them away before looking again, at the slow ripples already disappearing.

“Yeah, you too.”

After his initial incursion it became easier and easier to take to the water. Another week passed, each day spent out at sea, before he saw the seal again. He did not go to any particular place – just rowed out into the deeper water, trusting in his instincts, which were currently telling him that if he were to find Bilbo then he would have to have more than just dumb luck – otherwise surely many others would have found the selkies before. This time he had ventured further away than usual, until the shore was no longer in sight, and he was beginning to feel the itch of anxiety at not being able to see his home when it arrived, its head just above the water again. Thorin nodded at it, quite certain that this was once more the same seal, though he couldn’t explain quite how he knew that.

“I really wish I knew whether you could actually understand me or not,” he said, after several long moments of staring, which was making him feel rather idiotic, even though there was no one else around to see him. The seal just watched him, making a small movement with its head that might have been a shrug, had it been human. A strange sensation came over Thorin, a prickling at the back of his neck as if he was being tested in a way that he did not quite understand, and after a moment he spoke again, his words careful and measured this time.

“Blink once for no, twice for yes.”

The seal blinked once, twice, slowly and deliberately. But could it simply be a coincidence? Thorin found that he was not quite sure, and he leant closer to the water, over the side of the boat, so that the strands of his long hair which had fallen from their knot fell into the water.

“Splash the water if you actually do understand what I’m saying.”

And once again, with perfect precision, a splash of water hit Thorin full in the face. He laughed aloud, even at the bitter taste of the sea water, and looked deep into the dark eyes of the seal.

“Do you know Bilbo?” he asked, but the seal disappeared beneath the surface without an answer.

Now he tried again and again to go further from the shore, spending as much of the daylight as he dared out beyond the sight of the island. His fear never quite left him, even on the day when he missed the island on his return altogether, forcing him to row back on himself in darkness, uncertain whether he would find his home again. But once more the dawn saw him leave again, taking to the water. The villagers were beginning to talk, he knew – no one begrudged him the time away from the mine, even now, but they were all concerned about his actions, about his apparent descent into madness. He barely saw any of them, leaving at dawn and returning as darkness began to stretch across the sky, falling into deep sleeps where he dreamt of saltwater, and the flicker of pearls, and things just beyond his reach.

Despite his determination it was many days before he saw his seal again, and this time it had to come closer to the boat than ever before due to a heavy fog that obscured the sight of anything. He was shivering in his overcoat when it butted the side of the boat gently, and when he leant a little to see he felt a great and overwhelming relief at the sight of his newly found friend.

“Hello again,” he said, the feeling of foolishness long since gone. “I wish I knew your name, it might make this a little less strange.”

The seal stared at him, and it seemed almost mocking.

“Yes, alright, it probably wouldn’t, but all this is quite peculiar to begin with.”

The seal seemed to nod, before it plunged deep beneath the water. But this time it returned, quite quickly, with a shell in its sharp teeth: Thorin hesitated for a moment before he reached for it, but the seal did not bite – it allowed Thorin to take the shell with apparent ease. On it was scratched four letters, and it took a moment to realise that it was a name.

“Prim?” he asked, still a little uncertain, but this time the seal barked in response, as if in agreement.

“Alright Prim, you disappeared last time, but you didn’t answer. Do you know where Bilbo is?”

And the seal turned, but did not submerge. Instead it swam, quite slowly and deliberately, glancing back over its shoulder after a moment as if to say ‘well, do hurry up’.

Thorin stared at it for just a second before pulling the oars from the floor of the boat and nocking them into place.

“I’m taking that as a yes.”

The seal did not turn to look back at him again: she swam with determination, occasionally adjusting her direction, but never by much. It was not clear to Thorin where they were going, nor by what means the seal was determining their direction, but he followed her nonetheless, until the light began to dim and his arms ached from the struggle. Yet row on they did, until the darkness took them entirely and the seal had to swim much closer to the boat, so that Thorin did not lose sight of her. Yet still they did not stop, not even when Thorin felt as if he could row no more: his arms screamed from the pain of it, yet he found still the reserve of energy to carry on, though he knew not from where. And then, just when he thought he could carry on no longer, the clouds above him cleared, and stars burned down from a sky that was entirely unfamiliar to him, laced with constellations the likes of which he had never seen before, and the boat was swept into a current, pulling him along with a speed he could no longer have matched with his oars. Luckily the seal seemed content in the current, barking a short sound that might have been of relief – Thorin was glad that he wasn’t going to have to steer them out of the current, for he wasn’t entirely sure that he would have been able to.

Swiftly they moved through the darkness, and all Thorin could look at were the stars above them, wondering at what stories hey told, so different from the skies of his own home.

And then, slowly, the light began to grow, the sky turning slowly from velvet black to the softest of greys to the pale blue of the early morning, fair and fine but somehow a little strange – the colours, somehow, did not seem right to Thorin. As the day grew brighter Thorin realised what it was about the colours that seemed so wrong, even if they were beautiful: here there was no sun, only the moon, rising above the water as if it had always belonged to the day.

This was a place of water, and the water has always been loyal to the moon.

And then, all of a sudden, a line of rocks reached from the water just ahead of them, and the seal barked, before diving beneath the water, leaving him quite alone. The current took his boat straight to what appeared to be a natural bay, though he was quite certain no mortal boat had ever been docked there before. He hesitated a moment before casting his line to a rock: there was something soft and quiet about this place, something beguiling and dangerous, that made him wonder if he really should be here.

But then he shook his head, and forced himself from the boat, his legs groaning their protest at having spent so long without movement.

No mere bad feeling was enough to stop a Durin.

The rocks with smooth, and slippery, and he was quite alone as he set out across them. This was the place of the selkies, he knew in a singular and unquestionable way: he felt it in his bones, in his blood. Though this might have been any collection of coastal rocks, there was a feeling in the air of deep and powerful potential, of the old magics, of the ancient ways of the world. A cool wind played with the hairs that had fallen loose from his knot, and it prickled uncomfortably at the back of his neck, forcing him to glance back over his shoulder, to make sure that his boat was still in place. It was, but when his gaze moved back, he was quite suddenly not alone anymore.

A woman stood before him, close enough that he should have seen her approaching. She was not particularly tall, nor particularly physically commanding in anyway other than the shrewdness of her gaze and the possession around her shoulders, a power that she seemed to wear as a cloak to offset the simply grey dress she wore, the pearls threaded in her hair, the fine silver-wire diadem that sat across her brow. There was something familiar about the softness of her cheeks, the line of her mouth, but in her eyes were all the wildness of a storm rolling towards the coast, and when he stared into them for a moment he found himself shuddering, despite himself.

“Who are you?” she asked, as he struggled to regain his composure. When he looked back at her he realised that her eyes had softened into something that he could bring himself to look upon: she smiled a little, as she caught him looking.

“My name is Thorin,” he said, in the end, and she nodded, as if she had expected to hear such a thing.

“We know that name here. I am Belladonna, and I suppose your people would consider me a queen, though such distinctions have little meaning in these lands.”

Thorin was not entirely sure what he was supposed to say to that: he glanced around them, and realised that several seals had appeared, so silent that they caught him quite unawares, and he looked to each of them in case they might seem familiar in some way that he could not quite explain, but none of them did. When he turned back to Belladonna she was watching him, carefully, as if searching for something in his expressions, in his actions.

“Why have you come here?” she asked, and there was a warning in her voice.

“I…” he wavered, unsure of what exactly to say, but it seemed that this queen would have very little patience with his indecision.

“Well?” she asked, again.

“I’m trying to find someone.”

That was the best he could do, really, and it was not a lie. He met her eyes levelly and without shame as she shook her head, just a little.

“That much is obvious, Thorin. No mortal comes here unless they are looking for one of our kind. Not even the shipwrecks wash up on our shores.”

She knew, he realised. She knew who he was, and who he was here to find – how much else of the story she was aware of he couldn’t know, but in many ways he did not care to know – that was not a part of why he was here, and damned if he was going to waste time now trying to understand the why.

“Can you tell me where he is?” he asked, and Belladonna shrugged.

“Why should I?”

It took a moment for Thorin to find an answer.

“I want to know if he is alright,” was all he came up with in the end, and it wasn’t enough, didn’t even come close to why, but it was all his clumsy words could manage, standing here on strange shores, surrounded by a growing number of seals, face to face with a mystical queen who, only a month or so ago, he would not have even believed in. Another man might have felt their reserve weaken as such a situation, but Thorin was made of the iron of his island, and his shores had weathered many storms over the years that it had stood, jutting proudly from the water, as if in defiance of the ocean itself.

“I can assure you that he is,” the queen told him, but it wasn’t enough.

“I would like to speak to him myself.”

Only now did she seem to lose patience with him: her hands balled to fists at her side and her eyes narrowed into something that might have been a frown. Her voice, when it came, was sharper than before, and Thorin had to resist the urge to take an instinctive step backwards.

“Bilbo remains in his seal form – it is the price he must pay for so much time upon the land. He could speak to you, but you would not understand it, and so what would be the point?”

“Why should I trust you?” he asked, and she turned her head to one side, a smile that was almost mocking playing about her mouth.

“Oh, but why should you not?”

Now it was his turn to narrow his eyes.

“I don’t like riddles.”

The queen sighed, then, and gestured for him to join her as she walked a little away from where they had been standing, to a ring of flat-topped stones. She lowered herself to one, and after a moment Thorin did the same, rather against his better nature. From here he could not see his boat, and he felt a prickle of discomfort at that, of not knowing quite what direction he had originally come from.

“You have been hurt often,” Belladonna said, after a moment of awkward silence. “But you must understand, your family is known to us. When we saw that Bilbo had taken to you – for we do watch our own kind, from the rocks and through the pearl mirrors – we were concerned. But he would not listen – he never does, the stubborn boy.”

Thorin’s shoulders set, his attention caught now.

“Bilbo can make up his own mind. And I am not my grandfather.”

“Perhaps not,” Belladonna replied, with a shrug again. “But why should we trust you with one of our own? You are not welcome here, and you should not have come.”

“But…” the words died, once more, and for an awful moment Thorin thought that he would not be able to resurrect them, would not be able to put any voice to the feelings that might have crushed him had he been a weaker man.

“I love him,” he managed in the end. “And I want…”

“What do you want?” She cut him off, her voice sharp, almost angry now, though he did not really understand why.

“I want… I want to make sure that he knows that,” Thorin managed, in the end. “Because I’m not sure if I ever told him, not properly. I’m not sure if even now I can, for I have never been gifted with the right words for the feelings that live deep within me. Even if I never see him again, I want him to know that the time I had with him has been the greatest I have ever known. And I will wait here, on these rocks, for as long as it takes to see him again, to tell him.”

And it wasn’t quite right, even now, but he had never been good with words, and it was the best that he could manage – if only Bilbo was here, if only Thorin could see him, for then they wouldn’t have needed words: they would have read all that there was in each other’s eyes, and neither would have needed any more.

“We will make sure that he knows,” the queen said, after a moment. “But you cannot linger here.”

“Why?” he answered, his voice louder than he had meant it to be. It echoed across the rocks, and when he spared a glance he saw the seals, all of them pressing closer and closer, desperate to hear. And with that came the old anger again, brightening: how dare they all have words which should have been only for Bilbo? How dare they crowd him with a curiosity for that which was not theirs, for that which they had no right to?

“Why do you force me from your shores?”

“This is not the place for mortals,” Belladonna told him, her brow furrowed in an expression that might have been anger but for the softness about her eyes. “You must leave!”

“How can I?” Thorin yelled back, for his anger was a heat within him that the cold wind could not quell. “How can I leave, when I need to see Bilbo? How can I leave him, when-”

“You will leave,” the queen interrupted, her voice harsh. “One way or another. Either you will stand here with stubbornness and pride and force us to throw you from our sacred rocks, where you will perish on the reef that you should never have broached. At best you might survive, be washed up upon your own shores half-mad and full of grief, and never again will you find what it is your seek. Or…”

She trailed off, for a moment, her eyes on the rolling clouds above her. When she spoke again her voice was softer, her eyes the grey of her raiment, her face tanned dark from a sunlight that Thorin would never know.

“Or, if you claim to love him half as much as you say you do, you will leave of your own accord. You will return to your boat, and you will be escorted back to your own kind, and in time you will learn the value of patience.”

“What value is there to that?” he yelled once more, and the queen shook her head, before looking deep into his eyes.

“Patience may yet give you the answer to the question that you seek,” she said, her voice a little deeper than before, and with it the fight left Thorin, in all of a rush, leaving him shivering on the damp rocks. “Make your choice, man of the stone, before we make it for you.”

He nodded his head, a jerk of movement, abrupt as he took a step backwards. No longer did he care if his retreat was seen as weakness: there was a shard of hope in him now, left buried deep in his chest by the words the queen had spoken, words which had struck him in a way that he could not have anticipated.

“Faith, dear heart,” the queen said, seeing the distress that must have been etched across his face. “You have known fire and death and fear, that much is clear, but with patience and reason, you might find once more the peace that you deserve.”

And with those words Thorin left the selkie shore, casting one lone glance to the small female seal that had drawn him here in the first place, who was waiting now beside the rope which kept his boat tied to the shore. He would be the first to admit that he was not the best versed in reading pinniped expressions, but he thought that there was a satisfaction in her features, a pleasure in Thorin’s decision, and she turned as Thorin reached his boat once more, and slipped from the rocks to the sea. The current caught him almost immediately, drawing him from the rocks and back into open water: after just a moment the shore had disappeared from view, and he was between the moon and the open water, under the canopy of a pale blue sky.

A fog descended on him soon enough, thick and impenetrable. Thorin simply lay back in his boat, and let it feel his face with cool, damp fingers. It was gone again soon enough, and when it was he sat back up, glancing around himself at a world that was much more familiar than that which he had come from.

His new friend – Prim – was still with him, quietly swimming by the side of his boat. When she saw him looking, she barked, and splashed water against the ship, as if in farewell. He whispered his thanks to her as she disappeared beneath the water, knowing that this might well be the last time he ever saw her.

The journey back to his island was a quiet one, but the winds were in his favour and the water suddenly calmer than it had been before, and it was not long before he saw the crest of the moorland reaching up from the sea. When his boat ran against the soft sand of the shore he leapt from it with energy that he had not known he possessed, pulling the boat up the beach until it was well beyond the tide line.

Then he returned to his cottage, which seemed to him to hold the air of the long-abandoned, though he had only been gone for a couple of days. He aired out the rooms, shrugging on a fresh jumper when it became cold, and swept the floors, dusted the meagre possessions he had, working with far more care with that which Bilbo had brought into the house. He changed the linens on the bed, cleaned the piled up laundry until his hands were red and aching, then hung all outside for the wind to dry in its own time. The rugs he took outside to beat, the dust and dirt from them catching the breeze, sweeping upwards to the iron sky above. He washed the bathroom, the kitchen, the windows, and once all was clean he built up the fire in his bedroom and shut the house off to the outside, retreating to a long, warm bath, before he crawled beneath the covers of a bed that seemed far too big, and wept until sleep took him, far sooner than he had expected it to.

  


* * *

  


It was strange, returning to normal life.

Many asked him where he had been, whether any news had been found of Bilbo on the high seas. No one said the word, but the suspicions that many seemed to have held were spread, and no one seemed surprised when he had little to say. Not one of them spoke their concerns to Thorin, but the truth of Bilbo’s nature was there, in all of their eyes, lingering in the deep beliefs that he had thought to be gone from his people. It seemed they had never passed away, had only been sleeping, waiting for a moment of faith to rekindle them, the mythology of the sea a part of their bones, lingering in their blood, alive and well in a people so far from the shores of the world of reason, of modernity.

Not a week from when he returned, he found Bofur on his doorstep of an evening. Little was said between them, but they shared a quiet drink in the living room together before Bofur left, pressing a small woodcarving into his hands without a word of explanation. It wasn’t needed, after all.

The small seal, its whiskers standing to attention, the craftsmanship the finest Thorin had ever seen, sat on his mantelpiece from then on, pointed so that it could see the sea from the windows.

Time passed: the seasons had little hold here, so there were few changes in the air and the land to mark the passage of it. Thorin did not need it though: the days seemed etched into his very skin, each lonely morning one more to be crossed off until the next. He returned to work, finding a solace in the deep earth that he had never known before: there was a satisfaction to the hard work now, which stopped him from thinking of other things, of gentle smiles and cool hands that made his chest ache when he thought about them.

He heard Bilbo’s voice, sometimes, on the wind. He did not know if it was his own imagination, or something else, but he always stopped and listened to it, trying to find reason or words amongst the sound of the sea. He could not, but he took comfort from it none the less, in the belief that Bilbo was out there somewhere, that he had not truly gone beyond where Thorin could reach.

Storms passed, gales were weathered. The slow pace of the island gave him a strength that he had not noticed, in the past, but now he finally realised all it gave him, and gave his thanks in turn. Though he remained in his cottage, the last in the village, removed from the others, he turned more to them now than ever before, volunteering himself for the endless litany of work that was always needed, repairs and renovations. He had shied from it in the past, but now the community closed around him, and he found that there was always a chair for him at a table of miners in the pub, always someone to stop and talk to, people that he was now, finally, starting to think of as friends.

And then one day he woke, just before dawn, as he had done most days of his life, and there was a feeling in his chest, and ache that had settled deep somewhere behind his ribs, for the days of his mental calendar had all been crossed off. A year, a year to the day, and the sky seemed to know that this was a day different from the others, for the sky was clear, the horizon already tinged with the warmth of the sun, the sea like glass from his windows, the wind calm and the air bright with the scent of promise. Even the gulls seemed quieter overhead as he ate his breakfast, pulled on his clothes, tied the laces of his old, worn boots, swept his hair into a rough bun at the base of his neck. He spared himself just one glance in the looking-glass before he left his cottage for the beach: his face, he thought, was a little thinner than it had been a year before, but the dark shadows under his eyes had eased, and there was a softer look to the wrinkles around his eyes, the lines around his mouth.

He took his usual route down the beach, not rushing, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his eyes moving from sand to sea to sky.

 _Faith, dear heart,_ a voice spoke to him from his memory.

Faith, and patience.

And then, as he came around a jut of moorland, to the softer sand that fell into sparse dunes, he saw a figure sat, where once, in a different time, a figure had sat before. Silhouetted by the sky and the sand the figure seemed quite small, at odds with the vastness of the world. Odd, it would have been, to see anyone out on the beach on any day but this one, and with the sight Thorin felt the ache in his chest shift, the slow uncoiling of hope, and he thought he might have smiled at the man sat in the sand, but in truth he did not know if he had managed to do so. All he knew was that his eyes did not leave the figure as he approached, his tread heavy on the sand, until he was close enough to the man that they might speak, without the wind whipping away the words that they might say to each other.

“Hullo,” Bilbo said to him, with a small smile.

Thorin sunk into the sand by his side, glancing at him only briefly out of the corner of his eye, afraid of looking at him too closely should he disappear, a fragment of a dream. He looked much the same as the last time Thorin had seen him, when they had fallen asleep together before Bilbo had disappeared – the same smattering of freckles across his nose, the same shine to his hair. There was no suitcase at his side this time, just a coat – a normal coat – draped around him. No shoes, bare legs – and there, folded neatly by his feet – the other coat.

The coat was soaking, Thorin realised, as if it had been carried through the water by some sea creature, dragged through the tide as it made its way to land.

“You must be cold,” he whispered, and he shrugged himself out of his own coat, unwinding his scarf from around his throat, pulling his hat from his head. Bilbo was watching him, eyes bright with amusement, but when Thorin gestured to him he pulled the damp coat from his shoulders, the soaking fabric pulling at his skin so that the movement was halting, slow, revealing skin with the translucent quality of pearl inch by inch. As soon as it was shed Thorin pulled the heavy blue wool of his own coat around him, wrapping the scarf around the pale column of his throat, thrusting his hat onto hair that was still damp from the seawater.

“It’s strange,” Bilbo said, still with that small smile. “For I am never cold in my true form, and yet in this one I so often feel the chill of the wind.”

“You came back,” Thorin said, his voice choked.

Bilbo nodded, and reached for Thorin’s hand, pulling it between his own cold palms.

“Every seven years the selkie must return to the sea,” he said, in a strange and faraway voice, his eyes drifting from Thorin’s face to the distant horizon, to the dark expanse of the sea, lit with the dawn’s rosy gold. But then his eyes came back to Thorin, warm and full of love, and he seemed to focus again, his voice more direct, his tone a little amused. “But after a year they may come back. Mortals always manage to forget that part, I’ve noticed.”

“You came back,” Thorin repeated, but this time it was muffled against the wool of his own coat, for Bilbo had pulled his face to the crook of his neck, and now Thorin was pressed close to Bilbo’s skin.

Bilbo huffed a quiet laugh.

“Your nose is freezing,” he told him, fondly.

“You’re not so warm yourself,” Thorin reminded him, his voice still low.

Bilbo ran a gentle hand through Thorin’s hair.

“They told me that if I was patient, I might find an answer,” Thorin said, and Bilbo nodded, of course he did, for he must have already known.

“But what was your question?” Bilbo asked, his voice quieter now, pulling their bodies closer together as if to ward of the cold dawn air, the whispering wind from the sea, the call of the gulls, harsh and unrelenting above them.

“If you would ever come home,” Thorin said, and with it all the things that he did not know how to say, all the love for which there were no true words, all the hope for a future that he had thought, for so many months, that he might lose.

“And do you have an answer now?” Bilbo asked, and Thorin pulled back, his lip between his teeth, searching for something in Bilbo’s face.

“That’s up to you,” Thorin said, quietly.

Bilbo nodded, once.

“Every seven years I will away to the sea,” he told him, holding Thorin’s hand just a little closer. “Every seven years I will have to leave you and answer the call that sings to my very bones, and for a year you will not see me, for I will be in the depths of the water, chasing the currents that make my blood sing, and for that entire year you shall be alone, without me. But if you can live with that, my love, then gladly I would come home, and be with you for the rest of the time. My land-life I would spend with you, and I swear to you, I will always return, as long as you shall have me.”

Thorin didn’t need anything more than that.

“Gladly I would live without you, as long as I know that you will return,” he said, and Bilbo smiled again, a bright and beaming thing. “I have no home without the promise of you returning, and I will live without you for a year for the promise of six with you, and every seventh year I will wait for you, and love you still.”

Nothing more needed to be said: they rose to their feet, Bilbo stumbling a little as he adjusted to the sensation of having legs again, Thorin shivering and the wind bit through his jumper, exposed without his coat. Neither minded too much: they clung together as they made their slow way down the beach, the pale sun rising steadily in the sky lighting their way, hand in hand as they took the long familiar path through the sand to the old, cold miner’s cottage, which together they would make home once more.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://northerntrash.tumblr.com)!


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